Google's Very Clever Indeed Streetview Incentives

I think we're all aware that Google tries to make sure that it only ever hires the brightest people that it can find*. Much of this brightness then makes things happen in software that neither you nor I understand: well, I certainly don't. However, sometimes they do things which are very bright in a manner that I can understand. And that's the case with this coming extension of Streetview.

Google Streetview will now venture into your business, at a price, and the Chocolate Factory has been busy signing up local shutterbugs, so El Reg caught up with one of them to find out what it takes to get one's shelves added to Streetview.

Well, that's lovely really: Streetview will now include the insides of your shop for example, if that's what you want to sign up for. However, there's a problem here: Google most certainly isn't going to try and absorb the cost of photographing the interiors of every shop around the world. It's one thing to drive a car up and down every street in the country (or world) and entirely another to go inside every building. Even Google doesn't have enough money to do that. Or, if we're to be more accurate in what drives a business decision, even Google wouldn't make enough money out of doing it to make it worth their while doing so.

So, obviously, these interior streetviews aren't going to be done by Google. But who would do them? There's plenty of freelance photographers out there and in the current business climate a decent stream of quick jobs would be very nice indeed. So, Google is licensing such freelances, insisting they get the necessary equipment, training them and then letting them loose to persuade who they can to have such pictures taken.

But we've still got this problem over who is going to pay for everything. The answer to which is the shopkeepers of course. Probably cost a couple of hundred pounds per shop ($300, give or take). Hmm, sure, there will be some shopkeepers who will just go for it. How cool, eh, having the interior on Streetview? But that's not really going to drive the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousand, that Google would probably want. Asking somebody to pay to be included is a little different from just filming the streets.

So what can Google offer that is worth that couple of hundred pounds?

Not that eye candy is worthless. Businesses who provide photographs have an enhanced appearance in Google Local searches, one of their shots appearing beside the listing, and that alone is probably worth the cost of the snaps if a significant proportion of one's business is coming through there, even if no one ever takes a virtual tour of the premises.

Ah, no, that is clever. Google offers something that costs it nothing (altering the ordering of search results doesn't cost them anything) but which is of value to the recipient. Of sufficient value to the recipient that they pay for something which Google then gets for free and which Google then makes revenue on in the future (through ads associated with a more detailed Streetview). No, they really do seem to have some clever people working there, don't they?

*As my nephew has just started there I think we can guess where all the brains in the family went.